


Mathematics

by englishable



Category: La Passe-Miroir | The Mirror Visitor - Christelle Dabos
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:08:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26794150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: Thorn has some respectful suggestions for the content of Miss Vice-Storyteller's performances; Ophelia has some respectful refutations, although the children's stories of the Pole may perhaps contain more truths than she is willing to admit.
Relationships: Ophélie/Thorn (La Passe-Miroir)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 72





	Mathematics

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this to be an added scene in The Missing of Clairdelune (the chapter “The Tales” specifically), but I suppose it verges on an AU/a “what if”, so I’m not sure how to classify it.

…

The desk telephone is made all from steel with black-lacquered inductor magnets and a horizontal handset that has, over the past week or thereabouts, acquired the bellicose personality of a swan, flailing and snapping and squawking to get away from anyone who endeavors to answer the calls that come singing through its line. Ophelia wrings its neck before clapping the ear-piece against her head.

“Hello?”

“The Treasurer requests an audience with Miss Vice-Storyteller.” The secretary’s voice is as compressed as a cork. “Current availabilities are between ten thirty and ten forty or between one o’clock and one fifteen.” 

Ophelia casts a glance over her shoulder. Fox is seated with Aunt Rosaline at a white ormolu table and is teaching her the rudiments of gin rummy, apparently never having been warned against giving cards to an Animist whose specialty is in the traceless manipulations of paper. Her great-uncle’s _Tales of Objects and Other Animist Stories_ lies open on the carpeted floor, layered under her scribbled notes for tonight’s show at the theater. A clock on the mantelpiece informs her that it is presently ten twenty-five.

She swivels her attention back to the telephone just in time to keep it from biting her ear.

“Since when has the Office of the Treasury maintained a direct dial into these apartments, sir?”

“Since five-thirty this morning, Miss Vice Storyteller. It’s all been arranged and paid for with the central operating service.”

Ophelia walks backwards from the wall so that the phone’s coiled metal cord pulls taut, though it keeps wiggling against this tension nonetheless.

“Kindly give my regards to the Treasurer and inform him that he’ll have to pick another date in his appointment book – my only availabilities today are between eleven ten and eleven sixteen or four twenty-seven and four thirty-nine.”

On the other end of the line there is a pause filled with static crackle and trepidation.

“Is Miss Vice-Storyteller certain?” the secretary asks; his voice wedges deeper down inside its emotional bottleneck. “The Treasurer simply insists Miss Vice-Storyteller see him – he says it pertains to her performance for Lord Farouk this evening.”

“If the matter’s that urgent, he can tell me so himself.” Ophelia pushes the glasses up her nose from where the fitful handset has knocked them. “But if he can’t spare even the time it takes to use a telephone, I’d hate to waste any more of it.”

The secretary draws a breath to offer his timid riposte, but then there is a bump, a scuffle, an insult whose rhotics have the unmistakable wrought-iron twirl of a Northern accent, and finally a clatter that is truncated by a grave, equally unmistakable silence. Somewhere, a file drops to the floor.

“I would like to know how I’m supposed to tell you anything, so long as you never answer when I call,” Thorn says. “You’re far too short on allies to be refusing the assistance of one.”

“I’d hardly –”

“It’s about your stories,” he says. “It won’t take but ten minutes of your time.”

Ophelia is still unknotting her frustration like a yarn skein when her fiancée clangs the telephone back onto its cradle. The line goes flat.

She stands there, listening to nothing, until the handset takes up a quarrel with her scarf, and then she goes into a water closet down the hallway and clambers up on the washstand to stick one leg in front of another through its mirror.

Her body reshapes itself amidst the parade-rest coats of Thorn’s wardrobe and when she emerges into the chilled office air he is busy packing tobacco into a pipe. He wears white shirtsleeves and a black waistcoat with twelve metal buttons. A stack of papers sits before him, held together by a brass fastener and placed at exact right angles to everything else on the geometrically fastidious desk; Thorn indicates these pinned papers with an acute, endless elbow and says nothing when Ophelia takes them. _ARCHIVES D133 – G345_ has been typewritten onto the front page, above the date and a longer string of numbers.

Ophelia looks across the desk at him. Thorn strikes a match and flame from the pipe’s bowl kicks up into those percipient, gun-metal eyes. Firelight draws out the fretful lines in his skin.

“I asked twelve assistants to examine our public collections and provide me with a curated compilation of their findings,” Thorn says. “Their research was restricted to stories cataloged within the last fifty years and coded under sections D1 through G3 as the segment of the decimal system assigned to tales composed for children or general edification.”

Fragrant smoke unfurls between his lips as he speaks. Ophelia turns to another section in the document. It is a title page and has been typewritten, as well: _THE BRAVE LITTLE TURNIP._

She lets the evenly-cut papers riffle against her fingertips while the document tumbles shut.

“You called me here to give me a book of nursery stories?”

“The members of the court,” Thorn sits back in his chair; the pocketwatch chain makes a loop across his concave stomach, “are not nearly so stupid as you think them to be. They permit you to lampoon them each night with your little tales only because you’ve come into Lord Farouk’s favor.” He tries to cross his legs but thwocks one tripod knee against the desk. “What the court knows very well is that depending upon Farouk’s favor is like tossing water in the air and hoping it won’t change to ice before it strikes the ground. He’s the only man on this ark with a short recollection – everyone else will remember that you once used your place of honor to mock them, and they will remember it forever.”

The sky beyond Thorn’s office window is gray, made transparent and immense by the wonderful reality of its cold. Ophelia stares out into this expanse while composing her reply, although the three-color lint on her scarf has already begun to rear itself in affront like the spine of a spitting cat. 

“And these stories you’ve collected for me,” she says, “you think they’re the sort of thing that will please the courtiers more?”

“They’re the sort of thing that won’t offend them more, at any rate.” Thorn draws the pipe-stem from his mouth. His sleeves are turned up at the cuffs to keep off ink stains and a pearly scar puckers the tendons between his wrist and elbow. “And I don’t give a damn what pleases the courtiers or doesn’t. My only interest is in doing as little as possible to satisfy their desire for collecting stupid and petty grievances against you.”

“If they don’t get that sort of thing from my stories, I’m sure they’ll get it somewhere else. I’ll put sugar in my tea with a spoon instead of tongs or accidentally make some man’s wig get in a fight with somebody else’s at dinner – those things have the temperament of roosters when you let them loose.” Ophelia sets the paper-fastened book back on his desk. “My great-uncle sent me that book from Anima. So long as I have to tell stories, that’s the only ally I want.”

Thorn sticks the pipe back in his mouth. The lines around his colorless eyes and down his hollow, scar-scored cheeks all sharpen, as his expression changes subtly behind the transposing smoke, and it is an expression so practiced that it looks almost like indifference, except Ophelia once glimpsed the torment of thoughts that rage behind it and has never yet been able to forget the sight. The long hand Thorn has laid atop his chair’s armrest is twitching very slightly.

She does not pick up the document again, but she does not step away either.

“If there’s a story you’d like me to share with the court, why don’t you tell me one yourself?”

She watches hypothetically for the effect this remark will produce. She expects a quirk of irritation in his brow, a downward turn of his lips on the scarred side, a shying flicker of his eyes away from hers: what Ophelia does not expect – although Thorn is always doing what she does not expect, this rigid, staid, dutiful man who carries a watch in one pocket and gambler’s dice in the other – is for him to bring the pipe down again and give her his answer.

“There was once a gyrfalcon whose egg came by error into the nest of owl,” he says, “and when the egg hatched, the owl and all her brood knew at once that the creature it had brought forth into their midst was a stranger.”

Ophelia feels her scarf and folded hands and even the variegated colors of her glasses go still, as if suspended. Thorn keeps his eyes on her.

“The owl had never traveled beyond the mountain forest where she lived, and thus consoled herself by thinking that perhaps there were other owls in other forests who looked as unnatural as her child did, at birth, and who eventually turned into what they were expected to be.” A shriveled tobacco leaf has caught itself in the wool of Thorn’s black waistcoat; he swats it away. “So she fed the strange child with mice she caught from beneath the snows, kept it warm through the spring thaws and taught it to fly come the summertime, but when the child grew into a gyrfalcon anyway the owl drove him from her presence for shame of everything it was and everything it was not.”

Someone knocks at the door. Thorn swivels his head towards this sound and the air around him gives a retractable flex; the visitor does not knock a second time. Ophelia studies his blade-edge profile and realizes that she has never asked Berenilde how old he is.

“You’re not a particularly attentive audience, you know,” he says, looking towards her once more; Ophelia gives a startle. “Any prattling child hearing this tale would’ve asked at least ten questions by now – have you got any?”

Ophelia draws a breath that carries the sweet smell of smoke.

“Where did the gyrfalcon go?”

“He found another forest on another mountain, and within it there were birds that looked the same as he,” Thorn says. “‘Yes, you may look as we do,’ the gyrfalcons told him, ‘but you do not fly as we do, or hunt as we do, or think as we do, and our ways are not your ways.’”

The fine leather of her reader’s gloves creaks over Ophelia’s knuckles when she clenches her fists. 

“And what happened then?”

“The gyrfalcon departed from them to find another mountain where he could be alone.” Thorn hooks a thumb into his waistcoat pocket. “And such is the way of all creatures who do not have their proper place.”

Ophelia blinks several times. Her glasses cycle through a fluster of different hues, the changing slides in a stereopticon.

“Do you really tell that story to children?”

“I heard it quite often myself.” Thorn turns his gaze away to peer into the pipe’s smoldering bowl. “It was one of Freya’s special favorites.”

“But that’s –” Ophelia balks. “That’s a terrible story.”

“So is the truth, typically.” He stands, no doubt to dismiss her, his body long and straight; there is something proud in the sovereign deliberation of this action, but at the very end he bows his head to her. “Tell the courtiers whatever stories you wish.”

She goes back through the wardrobe with a chastised, quavering heart and sits atop the washstand, swinging her feet while she thinks. 

The tap begins to drip.

…

He does not have sufficient time to attend the evening’s performance, strictly speaking, but Thorn has long since understood that his work is a white sandglass that will go on turning itself over into infinity if it is given leave to do so. This is an understanding that has only lately struck him as somehow disagreeable, for reasons that are as vast and vague as sorrow and therefore inaccessible to the reaches of his articulation, and so he nevertheless finds himself edging into a seat in the theater’s highest row just after its gas-piped house lights have darkened.

On the stage stands a girl, by herself, and before her is an audience whose accumulated attention hangs above her like a cliff of snow, awaiting the sound that will send it crashing loose into an avalanche. Nobody takes note of Thorn’s entrance. 

Farouk waits below in a frost-glitter expectation; Ophelia walks to the edge of the stage, one foot before another, and gathers her skirts to the side before sitting. She is not carrying her great-uncle’s book.

“There was once a gyrfalcon,” she says, “whose egg came by error into the nest of owl.”

Thorn jams a hand in his pocket to take out the watch. He clicks it open and shut. He has known this story by now for almost three decades and counts it among all the world’s other inconsequential cruelties, mostly in that it can hold no further surprises for him, and he does not listen; instead he watches Ophelia, the way she cocks her ear towards a question and tosses away those dark tumultuous curls whenever they get in her eyes or tickle her nose. She pauses several times to clear her throat for that hoarse little voice.

Thorn’s thumb presses down on the watch’s key-stem.

In their pitilessly protracted correspondences with him, the Doyennes had praised his future wife’s spotless lineage, her meek and mild manners, her peerless education, the great prize of her reader’s hands, the unassailable state of her purity and the hereditary likelihood of an impressive fecundity – Thorn had squashed this particular letter like a spider under the management bureau circular he once used for bludgeoning an assassin to death – but it occurs to him only now that they had never once disclosed what she looked like. 

Watching her, it seems that Thorn has always simply known.

She clears her throat again. The story is ending; the gyrfalcon is being told that the new forest’s ways are not his ways; he is taking his leave again, rising into the upper air of solitude where nothing can touch him, and such is –

“— But wait,” Ophelia says. “Wait – what happened when the gyrfalcon came to the third mountain?” She stands. “What happened after that?”

The audience, already lifting its hands to deliver their perfunctory applause, halts with the singularity of a society. Ophelia steps back until the stage’s footlights throw her face into sharp relief against the darkness and stretch her shadow long behind her. Thorn has wondered, a time or two, whether his Gift to her upon their marriage will be his Chronicler’s memory or his Dragon’s claws — the thought of this intimacy between their spirits puts him into a strange state that is perilously close to thrill — but Ophelia pulls her spine straighter and he no longer has any doubt.

“The falcon met a hunter, there up on the last mountain. The man was –”

Her glasses change color. There is a plummet through Thorn’s chest; he knows the color well and it announces to him that this intractable, ineluctable, true-hearted woman he has willingly carried into a nest of vipers to become his wife is about to commit one of those flagrant idiocies particular to the honest, because he recognizes even from this great distance that it is the color of her courage.

“—He was a one of the d—” she halts, “—the man had been cast out long ago by the other clans, just like the falcon had, and he lived all alone.”

The reaction from the audience is a hiss, foaming like an ocean wave over a pebbled shore. Thorn is already on his feet; Farouk merely moves a hand to make the whisperings recede.

Ophelia keeps speaking.

“The man –” she takes a breath, “the man met the gyrfalcon, and he didn’t have any idea what its ways were supposed to be or not, because of course the man’s ways were different, too – ‘You’re alone,’ the hunter told the falcon, ‘but so am I.’” Ophelia raises her head as though drinking her next words from a chalice. “‘Which means there’s two of us together now, doesn’t it?’”

Light glances off the frames of her glasses. Her challenging eyes move along the theater seats to find Thorn, among the uncounted other faces, and for an instant an illumination seems to pierce all through his body and blood. Ophelia does not move; neither does he. The second wave of gossiping dissention is loud enough that it does not quell until Farouk gets up, at last, joint by joint like a thing assembling itself, to say his words of dismissal.

“You will tell me another story tomorrow evening, Miss Vice-Storyteller.”

The audience, at this prompt, applauds. Ophelia bows and exits, stage right.

Thorn watches her go.

…

_“There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two._ _But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.”_

\- _G.K. Chesterton_

_…_

**Author's Note:**

> If you can’t guess, “The Ugly Duckling” is my least favorite fairy tale and I will personally lampoon it every chance I get.


End file.
